Volcanic eruptions and a Quaker cemetery may link the Little Ice Age to rickets
Most people blame coal smoke and crowded cities for the rickets that swept through industrial England. A new study of a Quaker cemetery in North Shields suggests the sky itself may have played a part. When researchers lined up burial records with volcanic eruptions and weak solar activity, they found that 91 of 109 people with estimable birth years were born within a decade of a major eruption.
A cemetery on the edge of the Industrial Revolution
Coach Lane in North Shields, in north-east England, served as a Quaker burial ground from 1711, with no recorded burials after the late 1820s. Pre-Construct Archaeology excavated it in 2010 and recovered 236 individuals. North Shields grew from about 7,000 people in the 18th century to about 26,000 by the 1840s, so the cemetery spans the shift from a pre-industrial town to an industrial one.
Local Quakers were relatively well off, yet earlier work on their skeletons showed heavy childhood stress. Previous research reported skeletal disease in 67 percent of the non-adults, with rickets and scurvy among the most common conditions. Rickets, caused by a lack of vitamin D, softens and bends growing bones. Our skin makes most of our vitamin D from sunlight, so less ultraviolet light can raise the risk.
What the team did
The team, led by Ellen Kendall and published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, used two lines of evidence. First, they studied the cemetery’s burial register, which lists 197 of the 236 people. For 109 of them, both age at death and year of death survive, so the researchers could estimate a birth year, give or take one year. They then compared those years with a list of 18 large volcanic eruptions between 1640 and 1822, including Laki in 1783 and Tambora in 1815, and with the Maunder and Dalton solar minima.
Second, they examined 30 teeth from 21 individuals under the microscope. They looked for interglobular dentin, small unmineralised patches that form when the body cannot lay down tooth mineral properly. Vitamin D deficiency is one known cause, and teeth keep a record of childhood because dentin does not remodel the way bone does.
What they found
Of the 109 people with estimated birth years, 91 (84 percent) were born during or within 10 years after a major eruption. Volcanic ash and sulphur can dim sunlight and cool the climate for years. Another 41 were born when low solar output and volcanic activity overlapped. Only 14 were born outside any identified solar or volcanic event.
The teeth told a matching story. Sixteen of the 21 individuals (76 percent) showed interglobular dentin, and some defects sat in annual bands. The authors suggest this may reflect seasonal dips in vitamin D, perhaps each winter, though they note the defects are not specific to that cause. Earlier work found rickets in 44 percent of the cemetery’s non-adults.
Why it matters
Bioarchaeologists usually explain postmedieval vitamin D deficiency through industrial pollution and indoor work. This study adds climate to that list. The Little Ice Age, a cooling period between the 13th and 19th centuries, may have cut ultraviolet light further in the years when these children were born and growing. In the authors’ words, bioarchaeologists should treat climate evidence as an essential part of environmental context. Kendall also noted that “we think of climate instability as a modern challenge, but it’s really nothing new as human problems go.”
Caveats and open questions
The link remains a correlation. The burial plan is missing, the register has gaps (especially between 1731 and 1780), and birth years are approximate. The team ran no formal statistical tests on the dental data, and the tooth sample is small. Because eruptions were frequent, many births would fall near one by chance, so a strong test would need comparison with other cemeteries. The paper also contains small internal inconsistencies, such as how it defines a high-magnitude eruption. The authors themselves describe the causes of vitamin D deficiency as complex, multiple and specific to time and place, and comparisons with other sites did not show a simple effect of latitude or industrialisation.
Even so, the study shows how a humble burial register can reveal the climate a child grew up in. It may change how we picture the health of early industrial towns.